Izenberg: Who could have believed that crazy Joe Namath would be right?

Associated Press File PhotoJoe Namath shook up the football world with his infamous guarantee -- which he backed up by leading the Jets to victory over the favored Colts.

Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg is one of three daily newspaper columnists to have covered all 42 previous Super Bowl games. Forty years ago, Izenberg was in Miami when Joe Willie Namath dominated a pregame week as no other player before him. And he was there when Namath backed up his bold guarantee at the Orange Bowl against the Baltimore Colts, who, at the high end of a 17-point spread, remain the heaviest favorites in Super Bowl history.

This is the way Izenberg remembers the week and the game that shocked the professional football world.

For two years it hadn't been a football game at all. It had been a con job, born of television's bankroll and nurtured with the blood of purple-tinted adjectives that should never have been allowed to leave typewriters. It had been the big sell of a counterfeit aspect of the nation's hottest entertainment product. P.T. Barnum, the old circus huckster, was alive and doing more than well with a mint-green money machine called the Super Bowl.

Super Bowl III

Super Bowl IIIJerry Izenberg talks about Super Bowl III with the Jets and the Colts

Twice, the American Football League had thrown the best it had to offer against the old guard NFL, represented by Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers. And after each train wreck, it had limped back to its side of the tracks, licking its considerable wounds while it vowed a vengeance that nobody believed it was capable of generating.

Now it was a new year -- a year in which Lombardi was no longer coaching and the Packers were no longer spreading their version of 100-yard thunder and lightning. But now there was a new giant on the NFL's horizon. The Baltimore Colts had absolutely dominated the season in the only league pro football fans took seriously.

Even the loss of the great Johnny Unitas for most of the season couldn't affect their march to the title. The Colts had moved behind the methodical play-calling of a nomadic quarterback named Earl Morrall. But now the word was that should the occasion arise, Johnny U. would be ready.

Not that there was anyone in America who thought he would be needed. After all, the Colts had Tom Matte and Jerry Hill to grind you down. They had marvelous receivers such as Willie Richardson and Jimmy Orr and a tight end named John Mackey, whom even the Jets openly acknowledged as a kind of Paul Bunyan in shoulder pads.

And then there was the defense.

It had shut out Cleveland in the title game.

No other credentials were necessary.

Most of all, it had the Smith Boys -- Bubba and Billy Ray. Bubba, for whom the Baltimore crowd all season had chanted, "Kill, Bubba, kill!" and Billy Ray, who did savage things to people who did not wear the same color jersey.

Against this array of bullies stood the lineal descendants of the New York Titans. Now the uniforms were green and white, they had been renamed the Jets, and they even had escaped the drip, drip, drip of the leaky toilets at the crumbling old Polo Grounds for New York's brand-new Shea Stadium in 1964.

But as Gertrude Stein, that poet laureate of places and things redundant, probably would have written of this franchise had she been a football fan:

"A turkey is a turkey is a turkey."

And most of the world felt that both the AFL and the Jets qualified for that description.

When Sonny Werblin, who headed the syndicate that purchased the team, signed Joe Willie Namath for the unheard of salary of $400,000, he got everyone's attention. To keep it, this team had to win, and most of us still had enormous doubts. How could you believe?

But now the Jets were going to the Super Bowl, and almost all of their 100-yard world knew that the Colts could turn this into a nightmare.

We arrived in Miami on Super Bowl Sunday minus seven with little hope that this would be a contest. By the next morning, we discovered to our delight that at least there would be a weeklong debate. The previous week, Namath had insisted that the AFL had five better quarterbacks than Morrall. He repeated it. Unfortunately none of us was there when it happened. The person to whom he repeated it was named Lou Michaels, a defensive end and kicker for the Colts.

We were all stuck in Miami while the Jets were quartered at Gault Ocean Mile in Fort Lauderdale. That night, Namath and teammate Jim Hudson had dinner in a place called De Fazio's. So did Michaels and his teammate, Dan Sullivan.

Michaels walked over and confronted Namath. Unhappily, even as it was happening, a bunch of us were eating dinner elsewhere in Miami. Timing was not my strong point that evening.

"You talk a lot," Michaels said.

"There's a lot to talk about," Namath said. "We will kick the hell out of you."

Michaels seethed and then sat down at Namath's table. Namath got up and walked across the room to speak to someone he knew. Now Michaels was livid. When Namath returned, Michaels challenged: "What will you do when we kick the hell out of you?"

"Sit down in the middle of the field and cry," Namath said.

Then Joe Willie pulled out a $100 bill, paid for the drinks and drove back to the hotel.

There were 37 versions of the story, including one where they were supposed to have been restrained from violence. It was a great way to start the week.

By Thursday, it sounded as though both sides were trying to knock the Lincoln-Douglas debates out of the record book. But nobody expected what happened Thursday. Weeb Ewbank, the Jets coach, reluctantly had given Joe Willie permission to receive an award from the Touchdown Club of Miami at a place called Miami Springs Villa.

The next morning, those of us who knew him immediately understood what always happened when you ignored Joe Willie White Shoes -- not that we could have gotten a ticket -- but it came up as "wrong place, wrong time."

Standing at the podium, a glass of scotch at his elbow, Namath rocked the room:

"We are going to win. We are going to win. I guarantee it."

By the next morning, Ewbank began to wonder if what he would like to do could come under the heading of "justifiable homicide." All week the coach had deliberately low-keyed it. But his quarterback had behaved like a cheerleader at an exorcism.

Weeb was so worried about the Colts he forgot to wonder what impact Namath was having on the Jets. On the day before the game, a young man named Bill Rademacher, a member of the special teams' suicide squad on kickoffs and punts, was sitting by the pool at Gault, enjoying the sunshine and marveling that, almost unheralded, he had gone from the campus at Northern Michigan to the Super Bowl.

He told me:

"Joe has been trying to shake us up. That's why he started all the talking. Well, now we're properly shook and I'll tell you something else. It's more than just his pregame behavior. He's telling the truth. We are going to win."

Years later, Ewbank would tell me:

"I should have listened to Joe earlier. It would have made the week easier. By Sunday, I did. By Sunday, he had convinced me we were going to win."

And win they did, 16-7. They won it, as Namath had told us they would all week, by throwing Matt Snell -- almost forgotten in the pregame hype -- at them and controlling the pace of the game as Snell ran through them like a threshing machine at harvest time. He evaded Bubba and Billy Ray again and again, his little white kangaroo-skin shoes moving with such grace that he turned his pursuers into Sonny Liston trying to audition for the Bolshoi Ballet.

It wasn't a football game; it was a chess match with field position as the king and queen. Each time kicker Jim Turner trotted out to get them another three, it was clear Namath had won another battle.

My most vivid memories are of Dave Herman, a converted guard, slamming into Bubba again and again, and of the shock of the Baltimore Colts as they reeled into the fourth quarter and sent for Johnny U. in desperation.

"If he plays," Namath had told us earlier, "that means they have run out of every other option."

He played and they had.

I figured I had blown it then by not listening to Joe Willie shouting cracks into the Walls of Jericho all week.

Now, in retrospect, I realize what I should have done on Friday was to ask him the final score.

Not that I, or anyone else, would have been smart enough to have listened.